The Dreamcast was a nice piece of hardware and a great bang for your buck when it launched, but it was still too little too late. The Dreamcast is what the Saturn should have been IMHO.

Instead of rushing headfirst into the 32-bit gen in late 1994 to beat out Sony's debut in the market with a console that wasn't exactly capable on the 3D side of things (not to mention a disaster of an early launch in the west), SEGA should've held back the Saturn's release until at least holiday '95 and retooled the hardware to be more forward-thinking and easier to develop for now that 3D gaming had finally arrived.

Who knows, the Saturn probably still would have finished 3rd behind the PS1 and N64 in the generation, but at the very least it would've been more successful with more software support, and SEGA could've launched its eventual successor the Dreamcast alongside the PS2 as a console much more capable of competing with its 6th gen counterparts.

Maybe Sega should try a handheld, it's a less competitive market than home consoles. Game Gear didn't sell that badly despite its huge flaws (6 AA batteries that drained very quickly and it broke easily, especially compared to the Game Boy). The Nomad was just a portable Sega Genesis with no library of its own and had a lot of the same flaws as the Game Gear. It was also marketed poorly and only released in the USA I think.

Sega always sucked with the launch timing. Genesis/Megadrive took a year to reach North America. It didn't come out in PAL region until 1990 when it was already a two year old system. I completely agree that Sega should have launched the Saturn in 95. A worldwide release for holiday 95 would have been just fine, since Sony didn't have a reputation in the video game market yet. Why get a PS1 when you can wait a year, and pick up a more powerful Saturn? Now if they had only thrown the Sega CD and 32x projects out before they could have seen the light of day. 

i remember my dreamcast fondly it was amazing. it came with sonic adventure and blew my mind totally. in the UK to get online you needed a £500 PC for basic browsing and email. you could do that with dreamcast it was sinply amazing, wont forget my time on the chat rooms simply brilliant

Great system, underrated. My favorite system fron the 6th gen and home to a decent amount of my all-time favorites.

The Sega Dreamcast didn´t last 3 years, it was 2 years and three months of life. It didn´t even manage to compete with Gamecube and Xbox because they weren´t out yet.
The Dreamcast was a great machine, but Sega said that with every Dreamcast they sell they were losing money. I think that the main reason why Saturn and then Dreamcast failed was because of the extremely bad relation between Sega of America and Sega of Japan. They didn´t communicate to each other, one wanted one thing and the other another (32X and Saturn cough cough).
I would love Sega to re enter the console market, at least with a handheld ( it´jut a dream of mine), because lots of awesome IPs are lost because of this :(

Yeah Japan had the Sega CD and America had the 32x. They couldn't even agree on how to upgrade the Genesis. There's way too many lost Sega IPs floating around these days. Luckily enough there's a lot of Indie devs making spiritual successors. 

? The Sega CD and Sega 32X were released in both regions.

I'm trying to find where I read it. This was years ago on an old website documenting the history of games. But anyway Sega of America wanted the 32x to be developed and Sega of Japan wanted the CD. They couldn't agree so both add ons got made. 

Edit: A few years after Sega CD,  Sega of Japan wanted a full fledged Genesis Pro, and Sega of America thought that would be a horrible idea. So one of the heads of Sega of America spearheaded development for the 32x add on instead. 

Love the Dreamcast. Still have a couple Dreamcast consoles and about 20 original games and cough a few backup games like Half Life and Propellor Arena. I got a lot  more entertainment out of it than my ps2. Loved the beautiful VGA output too which I used to connect to my Panasonic AE100 projector. Great times.